Book publishers are constantly bedeviled by the need to make their books stand out from the piles of others issued every year. Every once in a while they’ll come up with ways to make them distinctive that I call gimmick books. I don’t collect them specifically, but sometimes I’ll pick them up just for fun.
A couple of examples.
Frank Scully was a popular entertainment columnist in the 1930s who had tuberculous and a dozen other ailments than made him spend years in hospitals and sanatoriums. That was incredibly tedious in the days before portable entertainment so he edited an anthology of jokes, cartoons, humor, games, and puzzles to while away the time. Fun in Bed: A Convalescent’s Handbook went into untold printings and spawned many sequels and imitators. So many that at some point Simon & Schuster thought it worth the money to bind a pencil to the boards. They glued on a small flap to hold the pencil that would stick through the dust jacket. Click on view larger image to see some.
In the 1960s, New American Library came up with the idea of “Greeting Card Books.” These were paperbacks with an extra flap attached to the back cover. You tucked the entended flap under the front card and the block turned into a parcel for sending through the mail. Click on See all 2 images for an example. People really did send them but got the postage wrong, which probably doomed the project.
Not exactly the same thing, but I have a copy of Golfing for Cats with a big swastika on the cover.
It’s a collection of essays by humorist Alan Coren (father of Victoria). The forward explains that the three most popular subjects for books were golf, cats, and Nazi Germany, and the cover was chosen to boost sales. It was almost titled The Golfing Cats Book of World Records. I doubt any of that is literally true.
I have no idea what the title was but I recall having a thick paperback of limericks, jokes, humorous short stories ( e.g.: H * Y * M * A * N K * A * P * L * A * N), etc. which had flip art in the corners.
I had a Stephen King “book” for a while that was très bizarre: they took one of his short stories – My Pretty Pony – and morphed it into some weird coffee table book. I could spend all week trying to describe it; this will give you a better slant.
I have a trilogy of novels from the early '90s (Griffin and Sabine, Sabine’s Notebook, and The Golden Mean), which are written as a series of mail correspondences between the two title characters.
The letters and postcards between the two of them are presented as actual items: the “front” of the postcard or letter is shown on the right-hand page, and the content of the postcard/letter is then on the following left-hand page – for the letters, the left-hand page contains an actual envelope glued to the page, with a separate piece of paper, illustrating the “letter,” within the envelope.
It’s beautifully art-directed, and was undoubtedly not a cheap set of books to make. (Wikipedia tells me that there is a second trilogy, of which I was unaware until now.)
When I was a kid I bought a book titled Take This Book, Please which is - you guessed it - a Henny Youngman joke book. But only the first half. The second half was “hollowed out” and there was a green insert in it to hold secret stuff. It was made of molded plastic with a lid and everything.
I always assumed this was mass-marketed but as far as I can tell, it isn’t. I mean, I thought the title was pretty funny for a book that potentially stored secret, expensive stuff! I don’t remember where I bought the book but I think it was at a real brick-and-mortar shop, not a garage sale.
It was a book consisting of paintings full of things for each letter of the alphabet. There was a workbook included that had a check list of things in the paintings (and things NOT in the paintings as well). You checked off all the items you thought were in each painting and mailed it in. There was a point system for right and wrong answers and the person with the highest score won $15,000
This reminded me of The Secret, a puzzle book from 1982, which featured twelve poems, each with an accompanying, elaborate illustration. Each poem/painting combination provided clues to locations where the author had hidden “treasure boxes” – anyone who found a box could exchange it for a precious gem.
Only three of the twelve boxes have ever been found; the author is now dead (and apparently did not leave notes as to the actual locations), so it’s an open question as to how many of the remaining nine may ever be found.
This reminded me of Cain’s Jawbone, a 1934 six-murder mystery that consists of a bunch of pages that need to be pulled out of the book and assembled in a certain order. It’s actually been solved, but there’s still money to be made. we have a copy of it and I’ve made some progress, but we’re definitely not going to finish it.
Just want to applaud, and say that this doesn’t feel gimmicky. Partly because the feature of having actual postcards and envelopes in the book matches the content (even the stamps… Sabine’s job is designing and painting postage stamps for the small tropical island nation where she lives).
And because the books are so well-written. The characters, the plot, the twists are all first rate. I’d love these books even if they were just normal ink on normal pages.
(Note to self: I have GOT to keep scouring used bookstores and find some more of these… I keep giving mine away!)
Barbara Kruger is an artist. Her style is graphic lettering on monochromatic photographs. I hadn’t seen this book, but a lot of her art has social commentary.
I used to subscribe to McSweeney’s Quarterly. Each issue came in a different, high-quality format; a hard bound collection of graphic novels, a book of short stories, other things I don’t remember that were pretty straightforward.
My favorite was the issue that came as a rubber-banded stack of junk mail. The advertising circular from a company advertising a sale on plural clothing (clothing meant to be worn by more than one person at a time) still kills me every time I run across it.
Pat the Bunny was extremely successful, selling over 6 million copies since it came out in 1940. It is a children’s book where they can interact with various object – putting their finger in a ring, playing peekaboo with their image and, of course, patting a bunny.
There were three sequels – Pat the Cat, Pat the Puppy, and Pat the Pony with similar activities.
